Preaching on:
1 Corinthians 15:35–50

​This morning I’m closing my four-part “fundamentals” of Christianity sermon series. We began with repentance—the opportunity to realign myself totally with the values of the Kingdom of God. In part two that led us to the core values of the Kingdom of God: love and justice. Part three was a reminder that (despite our calling to act out our faith) what we long to be transformed into through love and justice is ultimately something more than human, more than we can do on our own, and it requires God’s activity, God’s grace. So, this morning, where does this journey finally lead us? What are we being transformed into by God through repentance, love, justice, and grace? This morning we’re talking about resurrection.

Now, if you were to ask the average Christian, “Where does our faith journey ultimately lead us? What is our final destination?” the average Christian would respond, “Heaven.” And that’s what we teach our children, right? In Sunday School for sure but also every time somebody dies, we teach our kids that the departed person has gone to heaven, and we’ll see them again when we go to heaven. We believe and we teach that heaven is our ultimate destination. It’s simple, it’s clean, and it’s spiritual.

Our kids do learn about resurrection—mostly in the Easter season. And we usually learn that resurrection is something that happened to Jesus. And if we believe that resurrection has anything to do with us, it’s usually in some kind of poetic or symbolic or perfectly natural sense. Resurrection is about life victorious death. Resurrection is about social renewal and revolution. Resurrection is about springtime blossoms. But resurrection isn’t about me, it isn’t going to happen to us, it’s not on our itinerary. Is it?

The Bible talks a lot about heaven. And if you read your Bible after losing grandma and grandpa and being taught that they’re in heaven waiting for you and after Sunday School lessons that teach you that believing in Jesus is about getting that golden ticket to heaven after you die, then it’s easy to read many of those passages as reinforcement that heaven is our ultimate spiritual destination.

The Bible also talks a lot about resurrection—our resurrections. I mean a lot a lot. But we’re not so sure, right? Resurrection is messy, it’s weird, and it seems a little too physical to be an ultimate destination, right? So, we kinda skip over it. If heaven is the ultimate destination, let me just worry about that and let someone else worry about some of the Bible’s weirder details.

But resurrection isn’t just a detail. You can’t escape the centrality of resurrection in the New Testament or the fact that if you read your Bible naïvely (without any preconceived notions), it’s clear that early Christians like the Apostle Paul believed that resurrection is the Christian’s ultimate destiny. It wasn’t until later that theologians began to develop ideas about an intermediate, heavenly waiting place before resurrection. And over time those ideas about the “afterlife” began to lose their temporary status and began to feel ultimate, overshadowing the core Christian teaching of resurrection.

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that grandma and grandpa aren’t in heaven. I fully believe that the soul survives death. But what we believe our ultimate destination is matters because we’re called so fundamentally to live out our faith in this world. I think there’s a difference between heavenly faith and resurrection faith.

If heaven is the ultimate destination, it’s too easy to lose faith in God’s creation. We might begin to think that the Earth doesn’t matter—that we can trash it, that it doesn’t deserve the same respect that we would offer to heaven. We would never landfill toxic waste in heaven, right? But this place? It’s just a temporary dumping ground for the time being. And these bodies of ours? Well, they don’t really matter either.  Our sufferings and our pleasures, our desires and our hungers, our emotions and our feelings, they’re all just physical distractions from the spiritual life. The body is in the way—a prison for the spirit that will one day be permanently left behind.

But if resurrection is the ultimate destination, the body isn’t a prison, it’s a temple. It’s not a distraction, it’s an integral part of the evolving process. And so is the rest of God’s creation. The Christian’s resurrection faith reminds her that Christian spirituality is physical from beginning to end. And for the Christian, the physical world is spiritual. It’s not heaven AND earth, it’s heaven-and-earth. Our ultimate goal as Christians is not to escape this existence through death. Our ultimate goal as Christians is to play our part in God’s resurrection and transformation of all creation. We can’t do it on our own. We need God. But God also can’t do it without us, without our commitment to the transformation that we believe is coming. What we commit ourselves to matters.
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We think about resurrection mostly on Easter. And we tend to think that we have two choices of what to believe in on Easter morning. We can either believe in the literal resurrection—that’s the physical one that Bible teaches about. Or we can believe in some sort of allegorical resurrection—that’s the one where we take all those wild Easter stories with a grain of salt, but we still affirm that the teaching of resurrection contains some profound spiritual truth. Literal or allegorical. Physical or spiritual. But this is a false dichotomy. It is the false dichotomy that Christianity is so much a part of perpetuating and also trying so hard to overcome. We see it throughout our culture: Scientific, physicalist progress in the form of new technologies divorced from meaning, miracles, and consequences on the one hand. And on the other hand, old-school, fundamentalist escapism from the demands and the opportunities of the physical world. But what if resurrection redefines all those boundaries? What if resurrection is both literal and allegorical, physical and spiritual? What if resurrection encompasses the entirety of the human experience?

That’s precisely what Paul tells us resurrection is in 1 Corinthians. Paul believed, without any contradiction or difficulty, that the resurrection body—the ultimate destination for me and you and everybody—is both a physical and a spiritual body. This helps us make a lot more sense of those wild Easter stories where people don’t recognize Jesus right away, or he sort of just appears in the room with you and eats a fish off the table. The resurrection is the perfect and final integration, final balance between our physical and our spiritual natures. On the other side of resurrection, there will no longer be physical and spiritual, there will have to be some some new word, maybe like a celebrity dating mashup: Let’s call it a "physiritual" or "spirisical" existence. It’s a harmonious blending of the physical and spiritual, an integrated, transformed life. This is the ultimate goal of our faith journey—a new creation where heaven and earth are united, and the physical and the spiritual coexist without boundaries. And if our culture as a whole were to begin to understand this—were to begin to understand that Christianity is not a war between the physicalists and spiritualists—just imagine how we might develop, what we might discover, how our commitment to love and justice and the values of the Kingdom of God might grow.

Resurrection, then, is not just an event we anticipate after death, but a process we participate in now. It redefines how we see ourselves, our lives, and the world around us. We are called to live resurrection lives, embracing the physical and spiritual as one. To live with love, justice, and grace is to embody the transformative power of resurrection in the here and now—enabling God to work through us in renewing all of creation.

How would your faith change if you shifted your future gaze from heaven to resurrection? How might that shift change how you live in the world? What would it be like to physical and spiritual all at once without any estrangement or contradiction? Is it possible that you and I can glimpse that future existence in the here and now, that we could expand our own capacity and the capacity of our wider culture to experience our existence as a resurrection in progress? May we live as resurrection people, deeply connected to these bodies, to this world, and to their transformation. Amen.

Preaching on:
Matthew 5:1–12

This morning I’m continuing with my closing “fundamentals” of Christianity sermon series. We began two weeks ago with opportunity and repentance. And we discovered that repentance isn’t about feeling guilty to avoid a bad ending in hell. It’s about seizing the always present but always somewhat elusive opportunity to realign myself and my values with the Kingdom of God. And what does that look like exactly? 

We answered that question last week. It looks like love and justice. And we discussed that there can be no such thing as a relationship with God, or a Kingdom of Heaven, or salvation without love (and the public form of love) justice. Jesus taught us so much about love and right relationships because they are the way that salvation becomes real in the world. We must not put grace so far ahead of works that our actions in this world become irrelevant. We are saved by love not when we receive it, but when we emulate it. When we act upon it. That’s when it becomes real, instead of potential.

So, then, Pastor Jeff, you must be saying that this total realignment of my values with the Kingdom of God and the taking up of my cross to remake the world in the image of love, these are things that I can achieve, right? If I just get up off the couch, and wash my face and comb my hair, and pull myself up by my bootstraps, and carpe diem, and read The Purpose Driven Life, and work my fingers to the bone, and run myself ragged, then I—I and I alone—through my action can transform myself, love the world, fight for justice, and fulfill my greatest calling and God-given destiny? Right? It’s all up to me, and I have the power!

NO. There’s a critical piece of the equation that’s missing. And if we don’t get to it, everything goes bad. Everything gets corrupted. It’s called grace. Grace is pretty simple to understand: Human beings are capable of doing a lot of things. But there is one thing within us—that dream, that greatest hope, so big we can barely articulate it, that deep longing for something more (for meaning and purpose and enlightenment and utopia and salvation), that hope for a world that is totally aligned to goodness and love and justice, that greatest destiny within us hungering to get out into the world--that we cannot achieve on our own, under our own power. And if we try? It’s gonna go bad.

On our own, we may be able to conquer the universe. And yet what we know to be true as Christians is that even that great achievement—accomplished up in the stars by descendants who will be so different from us that they’ll seem like gods to us—it will not satisfy them, will not satisfy us. We long for something that is more than us and more than we could ever become on our own. Are we doomed then? No, there’s hope because there is a power that we have access to that can help us. It’s God’s power. It’s bigger than us, beyond us, and it’s given to us freely. We call this grace.

Some Christians talk a lot about the total depravity of the human condition. Oi. I find that to be pessimistic, indulgent, and counterproductive. It’s a way of trying to force us, through guilt and negativity, to pay attention to grace. But I think it’s led to a backlash against grace and God’s power because it simply isn’t true. We’re not all bad. We’re not! In fact, Christianity affirms everything that is good in humanity and in the world. The body is good, sexuality is good, culture is good, art and music and community are good. There is much that is good in us and in the world, and we should pay attention to it, work for it, learn from it all.

It’s not that we’re bad, it’s simply that we’re incomplete. We’re unfinished. We’re a work in progress. That’s all. And the power or the destiny that is shaping what we will become in the next world is not our own. The power that puts that deep longing for something more within us is a power that is not totally us. It is beyond us, it’s God’s power. So, whatever ideas we come up with on our own to be more than human—to start putting computers in our heads, to replace ourselves with AI, to go back to nature, to travel to the stars, to perfect our genes with crisper—whatever it is, it’s not going to truly satisfy or perfect us.

And, in fact, when everybody has a computer in their brain and three arms and we’re all living on Mars, unless those transformations have been guided by the power of grace rather than human power, then things could go very badly for us. It could be a far worse future that we enact for ourselves. And even if that future world would appear to us to be a utopia—a demonstrably much better world by every metric—the people living in it would not necessarily be any closer than we are to our true human destiny because that requires something more than even our wildest sci-fi, utopian fantasies can provide.

So, what’s required? I mean, isn’t the whole thing about grace that it’s freely given? So don’t we then have it? Yes, it’s freely given and accessible to all, and yet in order for this greatest power to have any power, I must act to align myself to it. And so if you’ve really been paying attention, you see that we’re now circling back around to the first sermon in this series on opportunity and repentance and aligning myself totally to the Kingdom of God. But let’s explore this from a slightly different angle this time around.

The sermon on the mount, which we heard read this morning, is a universal sermon. What I mean by that is this: Jesus addresses this sermon to a very specific audience of poor, displaced, disenfranchised, struggling people. And yet, Jesus was not only speaking to marginalized people, he is speaking to all of us. Jesus was addressing the poor, but he was addressing them about the poverty of the human condition, which is true for all of us. No matter how rich, how powerful, how comfortable we may be, none of can ever escape the fact that the sermon on the mount addresses me and the humbleness of our human condition. But Jesus tells this meekness, this hunger, this mourning, this spiritual poverty is our blessing. Why? How could this be? 

It’s our blessing because it is the way of disassociating ourselves from self-power and realigning ourselves to God’s grace and God’s power. The way I understand him, Jesus believed that the poor and the marginalized had a spiritual advantage over the rich and the powerful. The poor were closer to the Kingdom of God than the rich and the powerful because the experience of worldly poverty (which is an evil thing, and unjust) had put them in greater touch with their spiritual poverty and encouraged them to ultimately rely on God’s power and grace.

Another example of this might be addicts in recovery. The first three steps in the 12 steps are these: 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable. 2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. It’s exactly what we’re talking about. And this isn’t just true for addicts. It’s true for everybody! But addicts, if they want to survive, have to rapidly get over the idea that we human beings can ultimately save ourselves and transform ourselves without a power that is truly greater than and beyond us. Jesus recognizes that those who are suffering the most have often come to this great realization while many of us who are well-to-do and comfortable are still able to labor falsely under the illusion that we can save ourselves.

Are you ready for one final twist? Self-power ultimately always fails. It always falls short. And it is ever susceptible to corruption and to gross error. So self-power can never cross the finish line on its own. However, that doesn’t mean that self-power can never do anything good. In fact, through self-power alone you can become a better, happier, more productive, more loving person than you are now. And, in fact, a little ego building is healthy for us, and natural. That’s why my message to the children this morning was a little different than my message to you now. I told them first to try their best. Because we need a little ego and a little self-power to grow up. And part of growing up is growing in power. And so Jesus tells us that the next part of growing up is growing in power to the point of discovering that our power is insufficient and only God’s power can ultimately transform and fulfill us. A child, as Jesus points out more than once, is naturally aligned with God, not yet having grown into power. But an adult must eventually make a choice. Will I choose to continue to try to fulfill myself? Or will I allow myself to be become like a little child again and be fulfilled by the power which is greater than myself?

So, here’s the three fundamentals so far: Now is the time to repent (to change myself) by realigning myself totally with the values of the Kingdom of God. The values of the Kingdom of God can only be understood through love (and justice). Aligning ourselves to the Kingdom of God means acting out love and justice in our lives and in our world. If we act out our vision for love and justice and a brighter future through our own human power alone, we will never be able to achieve the total transformation we long for. And as works in progress, we will always be in danger of corruption and gross error. And so, one of the most important ways we must align ourselves to the values of the Kingdom of God and one of the most important ways we can express love and make justice is by outgrowing the desire to save ourselves and the world by our own power. As we naturally realize and learn the limitations of our own human potential, we discover that the true potential is that which was always there within us from the very beginning—God’s potential within us, given to us freely by grace. So to allow that grace and that power to take total control, we must (as Howard Thurman put it) yield the nerve center of our consent totally to God by embracing the fundamental humbleness, meekness, and poverty at the very center of our human condition.

Next week, we’re going to ask then, what does the future really look like? What is God’s plan for us? What might it look like when we’re no longer works in progress? Next week we’ll be discussing my final fundamental, resurrection and rebirth.

In the meantime, let Jesus’ sermon on the mount allow you to loosen your grip on the idea that you must ultimately help yourself, save yourself, fix the world through your power alone. And ask yourself: Do I believe I have to save myself and fix everything all on my own? Do I act like I have to save myself and fix everything all on my own? What is it that I truly long for? And how can accepting my own imperfect humanity help me become what I most long to be? And remember: As Saint Irenaeus put it, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” By grace, may we all come fully alive. Amen.

Preaching on:
Matthew 22:33–40

This morning I’m continuing with my closing “fundamentals” of Christianity sermon series. We began last week with opportunity and repentance. And we discovered that repentance is not about feeling guilty to avoid a bad ending in hell. It’s about seizing the always present but always somewhat elusive opportunity to realign myself and my values with the Kingdom of God. What does that look like exactly?  Well, that’s what we’re talking about this week: love and justice. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And a second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Bonnie and I were at a street fair this weekend. And one of the attractions was a tent from an Evangelical Bible church. They had a lot of volunteers, and they were bumping with activity. Inside their tent, people were reading the Bible, praying, and (I assume) getting saved. I was handed a tract as I walked past, and the man who handed it to me told me it was very important and asked me to make sure that I read it. There was a picture of hellfire on it. And it assured me that I am sinner (no surprise there). And it told me that because I am a sinner, and because there is nothing I can do to earn God’s forgiveness, and because no amount of good deeds could ever make up for what a wretch I am, my only choice is to accept Jesus’ atoning sacrifice on the cross for my sins by praying the prayer on the back of the tract.

The church had a lot of literature out on their tables about Christianity. There were a lot of quotes from the Bible. I mean a lot. Every other sentence was backed up with chapter and verse proof. But in all that literature, there was not one mention of loving your neighbors as you love yourself. Which seems funny because Jesus said there is no greater commandment (Mark 12:31). There was also not one mention of treating others the way you want to be treated (Luke 6:31). Not one mention of loving your enemies (Matthew 5:44). Not one mention of selling everything you have and giving the proceeds to the poor (Matthew 19:21). Not one mention of the sermon on the mount—that the poor and the mourning and the peacemakers are now blessed (Matthew 5:1-12). Not one mention of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, or visiting the prisoners (Matthew 25:31–46).

It makes you wonder why Jesus bothered wasting his time telling us anything about love, or about how to treat others, or about how to treat the most vulnerable, if none of it matters enough to even make it into the brochure. Jesus definitely came to teach us about grace, and faith, and salvation. But he taught us about grace, and faith, and salvation manifested through love and justice in this world. The Evangelical and fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity distorts Christianity by putting grace so far ahead of works that works become irrelevant, by making it seem possible that faith and salvation can exist outside of love and relationships in this world.

It’s like trying to tell people that it’s not food that they need, it’s nutrition. Well, we do need nutrition, but how are you going to get it without the food? We need salvation, we need grace, sure, but how are we going to get it without Jesus’ main course—love, and the right relationships among people that love demands?

A few tents down from the Evangelicals there was a United Methodist Church. They had a smattering of people around their tent—nothing too exciting. The brochures on their table were for a ministry they run for people with dementia. Every week volunteers run an afternoon program so the caregivers of the folks with dementia can take a break for a couple of hours.

If the important thing is individual salvation (going to heaven when you die) through a particular belief (in Jesus on the cross) through a particular act of piety (a prayer), then this program for dementia patients and their exhausted caregivers doesn’t matter, does it? In fact, nothing really matters. This world doesn’t matter. And I don’t matter. My character, my effort, my relationships, my suffering, my victories, my compassion, my sacrifices, none of it really matters.

But when we realize that the important thing is love and how we express and organize and live out that love in the world, then suddenly a humble, small-town program for dementia patients held in the basement of a little rundown church IS the Kingdom of God being born upon the earth. It’s not about me getting saved. It’s not about Jesus, my personal Lord and savior. It’s about universal salvation, Jesus the savior of the world, and us, his disciples who he has called to take up our crosses and follow him (Matthew 16:24). The disciples didn’t just believe in Jesus. They followed him! They did what he said, lived as he lived, and worked with him to love others and make justice in the world far from the centers of power and influence. That was the announcement of the coming of the Kingdom of God. That was good news to the poor. And that’s what Jesus is still asking us for.

There’s an old joke: A man prayed fervently every week to win the lottery. Week after week would go by, and he’d never win. He began to lose faith, and so he prayed to God one last time, “God, you told me that anything I prayed for I would get. And you know how hard I have prayed! And you know how much I believe! And you know how much I need this money, and the good I’ll do with it! So, you answer me now: Why, after all this time, have I still not won that lottery?” And so powerful was the man’s prayer that the heavens parted, and God appeared above him on a cloud. And God looked down upon him and said, “Schmuck! You still have to buy a ticket!”

To translate this joke back into our sermon, grace and salvation without action are nothing more than ideas—just disembodied concepts. In order to actually take shape in your life, in our world, in order to become real, action must be taken. When we go out and love people, when we go out to make the world a better place, when we go out to make our society and our culture more fair and more kind, the grace that we all so desperately need begins to take on real form.

Love is God’s primary force. So much so, that the Bible tells us that God IS love (1 John 4:8). When the Apostle Paul talks about virtues, he tells us that the greatest virtue—greater even than faith—is love (1 Corinthians 13:13). And in our scripture reading this morning Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is love, and that loving God and loving your neighbor are inseparable. “When you did it for the least of these, you did it for me” (Matthew 25:40).

Faith, grace, salvation—all wonderful things, all true, but none of them can be put in front of love, and all of them must be understood through love. And love, as the Bible and Jesus discuss it, is not an emotion. It’s a way of being in right relationship to your neighbors and of doing no harm—even to your enemies or to those who persecute you. This is the very love that Jesus demonstrated on the cross. And that love saves us not when we accept it, but when we emulate it: Take up your crosses and follow me.

There are a lot of different visions for justice in this world. Jesus’ vision is pretty simple to understand, but sometimes hard to follow. Abusers will stop their abuse. Violence will never be justified. Those with too much will reduce themselves down to the right size while ensuring that those without enough are cared for. We will share openly with one another. When we are in conflict, we will forgive and reconcile. We will confront sin and injustice boldly, and we will do it with humility, never thinking ourselves better than others. We will not judge. We will allow the poor and the marginalized among us to become our leaders and teachers. We will all sit at the table together without regard for power or status, never seeking advantage for ourselves over another. We will feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, and visit the prisoners. We will give everything we have, even our lives, to brining this vision and these values into the world. Simple, right? But can we do this all on our own?

No. You can’t do it on your own. Nobody can. But that’s OK. Because the main course of love is always served by God with a garnish of grace. They go together like mashed potatoes and gravy. The Evangelicals and the fundamentalists are right about one thing, for sure. We live in a world that has convinced itself that the most important things in life are all things that I can earn for myself through hard work, or talent, or brash, narcissistic bullying, or whatever it may be. And so next week, I’m going to be talking about grace, about how important it is, and what it tells us about ourselves and spirituality.

In the meantime, carry Jesus’ vision for justice in this world in your heart this week and let it work on you: "Love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself." And ask yourself: What does it mean to love God with everything? Is there anything in my life that’s getting in between me and my love of God? What does it mean to love my neighbor as I love myself? Do I love myself? What would the world look like if love always came first? What can I offer to my neighbors that make the Kingdom of God a little more real in the world? And remember: Love always wins (1 Corinthians 13:8), but only if you’re willing to buy a ticket!

Preaching on:
Mark 1: 14–20

For a long time, I’ve been wanting to put together a sermon series that would allow me to preach “the fundamentals” of Christianity. Only, I don’t want to preach them “by the book.” And I don’t want to preach them yet to people totally unfamiliar with Christianity. I want to preach on the themes and concepts that most inform my own experience and practice of Christianity, and I want to make my case for why they’re core principles to folks who already have their own sense of what Christianity is. And I want to be able to dialogue about it with you. So, all this month I’ve decided to do a bit of a retrospective on the important themes that have come up in my preaching here at GRCC over the last five years. And I’ll try to be direct, whereas before I may have been a little more circumspect.

Now, it may surprise you to learn after hearing the reading this morning that I’m not really going to be talking about calling, or following Jesus, or becoming fishers of people. Those are all important, but to truly understand them you have to first understand what comes just before them. So, allow me to retranslate for you Jesus’ inaugural message to the world, his first sermon, so you can hear it again for the first time:

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, “The perfect moment is right now, and the Kingdom of God is breaking through! Change your self and believe in the good news.”

This message is the context for what happens to Simon, Andrew, James, and John. This message is what gets under their skin. Or maybe it was already living under their skin, but Jesus comes along, and he activates it. Jesus doesn’t tell the disciples the end of the world is coming, he doesn’t tell them to feel miserable about their failures and shortcomings, he doesn’t tell them to believe in him or his saving death on the cross, or any of that. The time is ripe! Our hope is at hand! Transform yourselves! And believe the good news! That’s all Jesus is asking for! No problem!

When we hear the words, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near,” our imaginations start straying into the apocalyptic. This is some sort of allusion to the end of the world coming. Earth will end, mad meanie God will take over, the good guys will be raptured off to heaven, and the rest of us will be left behind to suffer and die and then go to hell. It’s not our fault that our imaginations go there; our imaginations have been shaped by centuries of interpretation and dogma and orthodoxy. And the unfortunate result is that Jesus arrives literally preaching the good news, and all we can hear is Jesus making some sort of implicit threat of violence or damnation. That threat, I believe, is fundamentally getting in between us and God, fundamentally getting in between the Church and the world. Even if you don’t believe the threat, you still hear the threat. And when you hear the threat that you don’t believe in, you can’t hear the real opportunity Jesus is asking you to participate in.

The joke version of this would be a guy standing in Times Square wearing a sandwich board that says, “The End Is Near!” But I think Jesus’ response to that interpretation would be to stand next to that guy with a sign that says, “The Beginning Is Near!” Every transition, every transformation is an ending, but the ending is not the point. The beginning, which is the opportunity overlapping the ending, is the point. When Simon, Andrew, James, and John left their nets and boats behind, that was a definitive ending. But that is so far from the point. Right? The point is what they will now become. Transform yourselves! “I will make you fishers of people.”

So, now we need to talk about repentance. The Greek word is metanoia, which literally means something like, “Change your mind” or “beyond mind.” Most Biblical scholars agree that the word “repentance” is an inadequate substitution. Metanoia is focused on this idea of personal transformation, but “to repent” in its origin literally means to feel really bad, to feel intense regret. Now word meanings change over time, but it’s hard to shake that baked in idea—which is so prominent in Christianity—that repentance is about feeling genuinely bad. And so I might imagine that Jesus is asking me, under threat of damnation, to feel really awful about what a miserable sinner I am. And that’s the path to salvation: to die in a state of repentance. Instead, Jesus is asking us to live right now in a state of transformation toward the inbreaking Kingdom of God.

It's not that this transformation Jesus is asking us to undertake isn’t connected to sinfulness, however you might define that word. It’s not that Jesus doesn’t “believe in” sin, or doesn’t believe it’s important, or even that he doesn’t believe that repentance or transformation shouldn’t be humbling or spiritually intense. So, let’s be clear: Jesus is asking us to transform away from sin and to totally and radically realign ourselves with the values of the Kingdom of God over and above all the powers and kingdoms of this world. That’s so big. That’s so really big. Can’t I just feel bad about something instead?

And I don’t mean to make light of the experience of weeping at your deathbed, and feeling regret, and taking responsibility, and confessing and asking forgiveness, and dying with an unburdened heart. That’s a beautiful and important experience. It’s just not at all what Jesus is talking about and it, honestly, if you think about it, pales in comparison to the monumental ask that Jesus is actually making of us here. The experience of Simon, Andrew, James, and John isn’t meant to be exceptional. Leaving this world behind is meant to be the natural response to Jesus’ message—not a guilty feeling, not a pious rite of forgiveness, a total transformation of your life. There is your life before this moment, and there is your life after this moment, and no one could ever mistake the one for the other.

OK. So, what does that transformation look like, exactly? I get that this is the moment for change. I get that I’m being asked to realign myself and my values with the Kingdom of God. What does that look like exactly? Well, we’re going to have to wait until next week to talk about that, when I’ll be preaching on the next two fundamentals, love and justice.

In the meantime, carry Jesus’ first sermon in your heart this week and let it work on you: "The perfect moment is right now, and the Kingdom of God is breaking through! Change yourself and believe in the good news." And ask yourself: Why is right now the perfect moment? Where and how is the Kingdom of God breaking through? What needs to change in my life? What am I becoming? And remember: The Beginning Is Near!